When a customer returns an appliance, such as a refrigerator, a washing machine, a dryer, an ice machine, or a dishwasher, to a retail store, the store will typically perform tests to ensure that the appliance is functioning properly before reselling the appliance. When the appliance includes water and electrical systems, the appliance is installed in a plumbing and electrical system for testing.
Floor locations on which the returned appliances are shown and stored generally do not include adequate hookups for testing the returned appliance. For example, appliance retailers typically do not have water systems available for testing the appliances. Likewise, the physical building may not have sufficient plumbing capacity or electrical capacity to conduct extensive appliance testing. In particular, when multiple appliances must be tested, the physical building must have a sufficient number of connectors and electrical outlets to accommodate the multiple appliances. Otherwise, each individual appliance must be installed, tested, and uninstalled one at a time, representing a significant draw on the time and resources of the retail store.
As such, when multiple appliances must be tested, retail stores will typically have the appliances shipped to a testing facility that has sufficient plumbing and electrical capacity to test at least some of the machines simultaneously. However, shipping the appliances also takes a significant amount of time and resources. What is needed is a way to test appliances quickly and efficiently, without shipping them to separate testing facilities.